Wireless communication systems serving stationary and mobile wireless subscribers are rapidly gaining popularity. Numerous system layouts and communications protocols have been developed to provide coverage in such wireless communication systems.
The wireless communications channels between the transmit and receive devices are inherently variable and thus their quality fluctuates. Hence, their quality parameters also vary in time. Under good conditions wireless channels exhibit good communication parameters, e.g., high signal-to-noise ratio, large data capacity and/or throughput. At these times significant amounts of data can be transmitted via the channel reliably. However, as the channel changes in time, the communication parameters also change. Under altered conditions former data rates, coding techniques and data formats may no longer be feasible. For example, when the channel performance is degraded the transmitted data may experience excessive corruption yielding unacceptable communication parameters. For instance, transmitted data can exhibit excessive bit-error rates or packet error rates. The degradation of the channel can be due to a multitude of factors such as general noise in the channel, multi-path fading, loss of line-of-sight path, excessive Co-Channel Interference (CCI) and other factors.
By reducing CCI the carrier-to-interference (C/I) ratio can be improved and the spectral efficiency increased. Specifically, improved C/I ratio yields higher per link bit rates, enables more aggressive frequency re-use structures and increases the coverage of the system.
It is also known in the communication art that transmit units and receive units equipped with antenna arrays, rather than single antennas, can improve receiver performance. Antenna arrays can both reduce multipath fading of the desired signal and suppress interfering signals or CCI. Such arrays can consequently increase both the range and capacity of wireless systems. This is true for wireless cellular telephone and other mobile systems as well as Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) systems.
In mobile systems, a variety of factors cause signal degradation and corruption. These include interference from other cellular users within or near a given cell. Another source of signal degradation is multipath fading, in which the received amplitude and phase of a signal varies over time. The fading rate can reach as much as 200 Hz for a mobile user traveling at 60 mph at PCS frequencies of about 1.9 GHz. In such environments, the problem is to cleanly extract the signal of the user being tracked from the collection of received noise, CCI, and desired signal portions summed at the antennas of the array.
In FWA systems, e.g., where the receiver remains stationary, signal fading rate is less than in mobile systems. In this case, the channel coherence time or the time during which the channel estimate remains stable is longer since the receiver does not move. Still, over time, channel coherence will be lost in FWA systems as well.
Antenna arrays enable the system designer to increase the total received signal power, which makes the extraction of the desired signal easier. Signal recovery techniques using adaptive antenna arrays are described in detail, e.g., in the handbook of Theodore S. Rappaport, Smart Antennas, Adaptive Arrays, Algorithms, & Wireless Position Location; and Paulraj, A. J et al., “Space-Time Processing for Wireless Communications”, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Nov. 1997, pp. 49-83.
Prior art wireless systems have employed adaptive modulation of the transmitted signals with the use of feedback from the receiver as well as adaptive coding and receiver feedback to adapt data transmission to changing channel conditions. However, effective maximization of channel capacity with multiple transmit and receive antennas is not possible only with adaptive modulation and/or coding.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,592,490 to Barratt et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,828,658 to Ottersten et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 5,642,353 Roy III, teach about spectrally efficient high capacity wireless communication systems using multiple antennas at the transmitter; here a Base Transceiver Station (BTS) for Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA). In these systems the users or receive units have to be sufficiently separated in space and the BTS uses its transmit antennas to form a beam directed towards each receive unit. The transmitter needs to know the channel state information such as “spatial signatures” prior to transmission in order to form the beams correctly. In this case spatial multiplexing means that data streams are transmitted simultaneously to multiple users who are sufficiently spatially separated.
The disadvantage of the beam-forming method taught by Barratt et al., Ottersten et al., and Roy III is that the users have to be spatially well separated and that their spatial signatures have to be known. Also, the channel information has to be available to the transmit unit ahead of time and the varying channel conditions are not effectively taken into account. Finally, the beams formed transmit only one stream of data to each user and thus do not take full advantage of times when a particular channel may exhibit very good communication parameters and have a higher data capacity for transmitting more data or better signal-to-noise ratio enabling transmission of data formatted with a less robust coding scheme.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,687,194 to Paneth et al. describes a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) communication system using multiple antennas for diversity. The proposed system exploits the concept of adaptive transmit power and modulation. The power and modulation levels are selected according to a signal quality indicator fed back to the transmitter.
Addressing the same problems as Paneth et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,914,946 to Avidor et al. teaches a system with adaptive antenna beams. The beams are adjusted dynamically as the channel changes. Specifically, the beams are adjusted as a function of a received signal indicator in order to maximize signal quality and reduce the system interference.
The last two patents certainly go far in the direction of adaptively changing multiple antenna systems to optimize performance with varying channel conditions. However, further improvements are desirable. In particular, it would be desirable to develop a system where both the transmit unit and receive unit take full advantage of multiple antennas to not only adaptively change the modulation and/or coding but also use a suitable diversity scheme, and spatial multiplexing order all at the same time. These adaptive changes would help to ensure that the communication parameters of the channel remain maximized while the channel varies. Furthermore, it would be an advance in the art to develop a communications system which could take advantage of multiple antennas at the transmit and receive unit to adapt to changing channel conditions and maximize any of a number of desirable communication parameters such as data capacity, signal-to-noise ratio and throughput. This would permit the system to continuously adapt to the type of data being transmitted via the channel.